The thing about news is that you want it to go out fast, and you want to receive it as quickly as possible. Messaging apps are quickly becoming the medium most tech savvy people prefer when it comes to spreading information.

So this team from Malaysia decided to create their own and named it AllChat World.

Essentially, AllChat World is a one-stop community mobile application that focuses on building an effective and efficient communication system that caters for multiple purposes.

They have a vision of growing a smart city that uses a single mobile app that integrates various social media features onto one platform. So the app will basically combine events, social news and messaging to serve a vibrant community through strategic connections.

The idea started back in 2015 and was only launched in August 2016 but since then, it has already managed to reach a wide audience. As of 18 October 2016, AllChat World has recorded a total number of 10,000 users in just 2 months.

Udesh Chaskar, the CEO of AllChat World, shared that the main strategy they used in order to gain traction for the app was angling their sales and marketing tactics in line with the market needs and focusing on integrating these needs into one comprehensive application.

Image Credit: AllChat World

“In the past month, we begun sponsoring various events where we felt was needed. We worked closely with event organisers to help create value for their event and users through our app. That by itself already subsequently increased downloads of our app in a short period of time,” said Chaskar.

Being users of many apps themselves, the AllChat World team catered the app to give users a better experience by making it easy to use and have a personalised feel.

But out of all the ways and methods they tried out to increase retention rate, Chaskar believes that their token system integrated into the app is the most efficient and cost effective factor that helped pull the 10K users to their app.

“It is relatively low cost as we didn’t have to spend much money on the tokens but the tokens would be valuable for the users in the long run. It’s a win-win situation for both sides,” said Chaskar.

With the token system, users are rewarded by being active on the app daily. Users also get a chance to earn points through recommending the app to friends and family members.

The tokens are meant to be used at the marketplace that will be made available in the app in 2017. The tokens can be accumulated in your e-wallet and exchanged for real-life items.

Slowly, the app has began getting more attention when word-of-mouth started spreading news about it. Its influence in gaining users to the app was one of the key factors that helped AllChat World’s growth hack strategy.

When asked the geographic location of their users, Chaskar shared that though most of their app downloads come from our local community, they have also managed to attract a lot of international users as well. The international crowd mainly comes from neighbouring country Indonesia as well as China.

“Our users around ASEAN is having a very steady growth in line with our market penetration strategies around the region. We are targeting to spread out as well as looking or industry players as well as partners along this line of Smart Cities in ASEAN,” said Chaskar.

Seeing as how they’ve only launched for 2 months, AllChat World believes they have a longer journey ahead before they can confidently say they’re part of the top community applications out there but the team already has solid plans they’re aiming to push out in order to build the app further.

The amount of users they managed to get in such a short span of time surprised the team the most considering they hadn’t expected the growth to come so quickly.

“Getting 10,000 users in just 2 months did serve as a confidence booster but we wouldn’t want it to get to our head. By the end of the year, we hope to achieve a minimum of 500,000 users. However, more than the download number, we want to focus on improving the users’ experience,” said Chaskar.